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Dr. Lunchables posted:Are A Time to Harvest or Cults of Cthulhu available in print yet? Those are the two most recent Chaosium titles I remember hearing anything about. Speak of the devil. Ab Chaos posted:June 20th:
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Jun 10, 2022 07:21
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DrSunshine posted:EDIT: Also I don't know how you pronounce "Shub-Niggurath" but from the videos I've watched, Sandy Peterson pronounces it with the hard-r, and quite happily too, it seems. (Personally I would say it "shoob NEE-goo-roth" but I've excised this particular old god from my version of the mythos for precisely this reason). It's very deliberately supposed to be pronounced like the racial slur. The black goat with a thousand young is supposed to invoke the image of fertile black women threatening to outbreed the while race, because that's been a paranoid racist fantasy since Lovecraft's days and Lovecraft made his paranoid racism manifest in his stories.
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Jun 10, 2022 11:40
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LatwPIAT posted:It's very deliberately supposed to be pronounced like the racial slur. The black goat with a thousand young is supposed to invoke the image of fertile black women threatening to outbreed the while race, because that's been a paranoid racist fantasy since Lovecraft's days and Lovecraft made his paranoid racism manifest in his stories. Yeah, I figured. Same with Deep Ones and the whole mess of problems and unfortunate implications around them.
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Jun 10, 2022 14:11
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Getting really into Bartheleme and his fiction is great for titles/first lines that would make great prompts or module titles for CoC or DG. My list so far: The First Thing The Baby Did Wrong Some Of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby I Am Not Altogether Sympathetic To Our New President See The Moon? It HATES Us.
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Jun 11, 2022 05:08
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PipHelix posted:See The Moon? It HATES Us. Very strong Local 58 vibes, I dig it.
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Jun 11, 2022 13:18
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Im running a Monster of the Week game and I want to do a mystery where my players end up in a not-call of Cthulhu game Jumanji style. What are some good premade adventures to look over and get some ideas from?
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Jun 11, 2022 19:29
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Len posted:Im running a Monster of the Week game and I want to do a mystery where my players end up in a not-call of Cthulhu game Jumanji style. What are some good premade adventures to look over and get some ideas from? Dead Light from "Dead Light & Other Dark Turns" is a good one. The eponymous Dead Light itself would make for an effective Monster of the Week I think, depending on the tone you're going for.
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Jun 14, 2022 14:30
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Single and LOVING IT posted:Dead Light from "Dead Light & Other Dark Turns" is a good one. The eponymous Dead Light itself would make for an effective Monster of the Week I think, depending on the tone you're going for. Saturnine Chalice from the same collection has an element of figuring out and finding puzzles that might evoke a bit of that Jumanji "board game" feel?
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Jun 14, 2022 14:40
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LatwPIAT posted:It's very deliberately supposed to be pronounced like the racial slur. The black goat with a thousand young is supposed to invoke the image of fertile black women threatening to outbreed the while race, because that's been a paranoid racist fantasy since Lovecraft's days and Lovecraft made his paranoid racism manifest in his stories. It annoys me because I loved that dumb goat, it's my favorite of the pantheon.
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Jun 14, 2022 22:16
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Are there any published campaigns that happen over a timescale of years? I started thinking about the long study times for tomes and whatnot in CoC and realized one could steal a page from Ars Magica and just run a very slow campaign, but the issue is, I've never actually played Ars Magica.
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Jun 15, 2022 10:37
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Siivola posted:Are there any published campaigns that happen over a timescale of years? I started thinking about the long study times for tomes and whatnot in CoC and realized one could steal a page from Ars Magica and just run a very slow campaign, but the issue is, I've never actually played Ars Magica. Not exactly what you were looking for, but Ripples from Carcosa is three scenarios set in Ancient Rome, Medieval Europe and 22th century which, or so I hear, end up being connected enough that you can call it a campaign. Megazver fucked around with this message at 11:12 on Jun 15, 2022 |
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Jun 15, 2022 11:08
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Siivola posted:Are there any published campaigns that happen over a timescale of years? I started thinking about the long study times for tomes and whatnot in CoC and realized one could steal a page from Ars Magica and just run a very slow campaign, but the issue is, I've never actually played Ars Magica. Coming Full Circle from Pagan Publishing is a four scenario campaign meant to be run over the course of the 1930s, but it's in OOP limbo because John Crowe is afraid of PDFs.
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Jun 15, 2022 14:26
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Megazver posted:Not exactly what you were looking for, but Ripples from Carcosa is three scenarios set in Ancient Rome, Medieval Europe and 22th century which, or so I hear, end up being connected enough that you can call it a campaign. Lumbermouth posted:John Crowe is afraid of PDFs.
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Jun 15, 2022 14:54
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Siivola posted:Are there any published campaigns that happen over a timescale of years? I started thinking about the long study times for tomes and whatnot in CoC and realized one could steal a page from Ars Magica and just run a very slow campaign, but the issue is, I've never actually played Ars Magica.
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Jun 15, 2022 18:39
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Eh, BtMoM is only about a calendar year all told. It’s a single exploration season on the ice plus travel to and from Antarctica, not years worth of events. Really the only one I can think of is the prelude to the new Masks of Nyarlathotep, where you meet Jackson Elias in Peru. The actual story takes place later, though I don’t recall how much later:
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Jun 15, 2022 20:37
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Siivola posted:Are there any published campaigns that happen over a timescale of years? I started thinking about the long study times for tomes and whatnot in CoC and realized one could steal a page from Ars Magica and just run a very slow campaign, but the issue is, I've never actually played Ars Magica. Actually, Impossible Dreams, the new Delta Green campaign book, would fit this description, as the first mission takes place in the 90s and then the later ones take place about twenty years after.
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Jun 15, 2022 20:42
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DrSunshine posted:Actually, Impossible Dreams, the new Delta Green campaign book, would fit this description, as the first mission takes place in the 90s and then the later ones take place about twenty years after. GOD'S TEETH also begins with a prequel mission set in the past, before skipping forward to the present day.
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Jun 15, 2022 20:55
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mellonbread posted:Are you talking about Impossible Landscapes or is there another DG Book in the works with this premise? Woops, that's right, Impossible Landscapes is what I meant!!
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Jun 15, 2022 21:18
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DrSunshine posted:Woops, that's right, Impossible Landscapes is what I meant!!
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Jun 15, 2022 21:23
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mellonbread posted:I asked because Glancy has also mentioned working on a book where you play one scenario set in every decade from 1900 to the present day, and I wouldn't put it past ARC DREAM to give it a name that was way too similar to another adventure.
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Jun 15, 2022 23:23
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Siivola posted:Are there any published campaigns that happen over a timescale of years? I started thinking about the long study times for tomes and whatnot in CoC and realized one could steal a page from Ars Magica and just run a very slow campaign, but the issue is, I've never actually played Ars Magica. The Yellow King by Robin D Laws is mostly focused on late 19th century Paris, but has three subsequent settings each with their own splat book set in alternate realities that branch off from the Carcosan energies your players encounter in Paris - a 1940s world war setting with giant spider tanks and airships, a contemporary post-revolutionary setting after a fascist Carcosan powered American government has just been overthrown and a second contemporary setting equivalent to our world where Carcosan energy is seeping in at the edges. The intention by Laws is that you play a long campaign starting in 1890s Paris, then transpose to the Wars playing new characters related to your original Parisian PCs, then move to the post-revolutionary setting with a third generation of PCs then finally the fourth with another generation. And then perhaps for maximum satisfaction (this isn't in the books, but he posited this on his podcast) your This Is Normal Now (i.e. contemporary world of today) characters discover that the weird Carcosan energy invading the world is because of something your original Paris 1890s PCs did back at the start of the campaign and you have to figure out a way to undo it. So intended to be played over 130 years and four realities and multiple PCs per player. It's quite an interesting concept, though I do wonder how many groups who play the game ever get anywhere close to a full campaign like that.
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Jun 16, 2022 00:07
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Drone posted:Very strong Local 58 vibes, I dig it. I may have accidentally ordered a John Barth book along with the Barthelmes. But I cracked it, and by god, first line is "In a sense, I am Jack Horner." I'm maybe 20 pages in and I can highly recommend it as a funnier Lucky Jim, page for page in the first 20 pages. Also, I did a homebrew, and I've seen other modules, that had a Groundhog Day gimmick. Those are always good assuming you have a good ability to escalate things to keep people interested and know when to bail when your crew feels they've explored every aspect of living the same day. "Jesus loving Christ, how long have we *been* trapped here? Months?!" is generally your cue to wrap it up. There's got to be some official modules that mine time loops for horror. Though, they tend to take place over a long time in game time and a short period, like 2-3 sessions in real time. If you want to just run a long rear end campaign, Horror On The Orient Express is a good long while and has a time-jump between 1930s and ancient Rome and Byzantine Constantinople, plus the dreamlands, and a few others, though I don't think the PCs are linked, its just self-contained sub-modules. e: Oh Man, I love Kris Straub! PipHelix fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Jun 16, 2022 |
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Jun 16, 2022 05:39
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I was reading about a pair of adventurers' clubs that are perfectly in period with the typical Cthulhu 1920s setting. In-theme too - I could imagine characters being members of such clubs and in a game there could be months at a time where the characters are figuring out what their next adventure is going to be, preparing, following low-stakes leads, studying tomes, doing research, etc.. All in the service of figuring out something awesome to tell at the next club meeting in a few months. You wouldn't need to spend a lot of game time on this downtime, because obviously the actual adventures would be the main focus of the gameplay. But it would be a good framing device for why characters know each other, want to work together, have so much time available in between the action, and aren't necessarily in constant contact with each other in between adventures. And of course the adventures they do go on would have to be of the "let us never speak of this again" nature, because aside from being horrifying no one even at an adventurers' club would believe it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventurers%27_Club_of_New_York https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ends_of_the_Earth_Club
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Jun 16, 2022 06:14
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Thanks for the tips y'all! Weird that there isn't that much material for this kind of play, since a lot of the material in the rulebook and the Investigator Handbook seem to point at it. I read the Handbook the other day and it had tips like "hey you could let players play multiple characters so you can play globetrotting adventures" and something in my brain went "Ars Magica grogs" and from there it's not a huge leap to structure the game to "seasons" of some kind, and at that timescale if you give them a couple of tomes they'll be wizards soon enough... (Isn't exactly this what led to the original Delta Green supplement being written?) I guess the lowest-effort way to do this would be to string together a series of one-shots and tying them together with a club like the ones BM linked? It's not strictly a Cthulhu game, but doesn't Fria Ligan's game Vaesen do something like this? Siivola fucked around with this message at 08:05 on Jun 16, 2022 |
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Jun 16, 2022 07:13
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I made a spooky creature.quote:William-O’-The-Sea, Watcher in the Water
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Jun 16, 2022 17:03
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BattleMaster posted:I was reading about a pair of adventurers' clubs that are perfectly in period with the typical Cthulhu 1920s setting. In-theme too - I could imagine characters being members of such clubs and in a game there could be months at a time where the characters are figuring out what their next adventure is going to be, preparing, following low-stakes leads, studying tomes, doing research, etc.. All in the service of figuring out something awesome to tell at the next club meeting in a few months. There's still weirdos like that https://microkhan.com/2022/03/22/the-farthest-end/ http://www.cordell.org/HI/index.html
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Jun 17, 2022 01:25
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DrSunshine posted:I made a spooky creature. Reminds me of when I was teaching English in Korea, and I took photos of the local fairytales painted on the walls of the kindergarten in town and assigned my middle schoolers to pick a story and tell it to me in English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugungga It's not mentioned in the Wikipedia article, but it was clearly part of the pictorials and the kids mentioned it, that the rabbit talked his way out of getting eaten by getting the Sea King sock-feet drunk at a big feast first. Boozing is a BIG part of Korean culture, so it was that disorienting foreigner-abroad one-two combo of that detail seeming out of place in a children's story and then immediately realizing 'oh yea, that's like everyday for here.'
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Jun 17, 2022 01:39
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PipHelix posted:They'd also lend itself to a revolving cast of characters. You have a PC die or a new person wants to join? They overhear you talking about your adventure in the overstuffed leather chair and cigar and billiards room and ask to sally forth and tally ho along next time. Oh yeah, and it also helps answer some questions. Why do you press onward instead of running away? Because you want to have an dangerous, exhilarating, and generally awesome experience that is notable enough to make you the keynote speaker at the next club meeting. Why don't you call for help? Because what kind of coward calls the cops for help? It would ruin the story and you'd be a laughing stock if anyone found out that you did. Real adventurers solve their own problems with grit and determination. Why keep doing it after your first run-in with horrific unknowable beings? Because you're chasing that adrenaline high and good story and maybe the next time you run into that sort of poo poo things won't be so bad and will make more sense. Plus holy poo poo magic is real??? I know that being an "adventurer" is the default for a lot of RPGs, but IMO it just makes a lot of sense for Call of Cthulhu because aside from the in-period literal adventurers' clubs, and all the era appropriate pulp fiction you can lean on, it does a good job of explaining why a bunch of disparate weirdoes go out there and keep coming back. Plus it's not like HP Lovecraft's protagonists knew when to ask for help or turn back. They took their battery-powered pocket flashlights and got right in there.
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Jun 18, 2022 15:21
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BattleMaster posted:I know that being an "adventurer" is the default for a lot of RPGs, but IMO it just makes a lot of sense for Call of Cthulhu because aside from the in-period literal adventurers' clubs, and all the era appropriate pulp fiction you can lean on, it does a good job of explaining why a bunch of disparate weirdoes go out there and keep coming back. This came up in-character in one of my sessions. An NPC asked an investigator why it is that they do what they do (everyone in the campaign works for a secret government agency devoted to investigating weird poo poo) if it's so mind-breaking and horrifying, and she responded that "With the kinds of things I've seen, this is the only job I can do now.  " It was a great spontaneous moment.
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Jun 18, 2022 20:20
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BattleMaster posted:Oh yeah, and it also helps answer some questions. Not to mention Lovecraft had more than a few times where the reaction of his characters to supernatural poo poo was less "collapse into a puddle of tears and slipping sanity" and more "use a gun, and if that don't work use more gun", and honestly at this point it feels more interesting to approach Lovecraftian Horrors as things that can be killed and thwarted(if at great personal risk obviously) than the more common approach a lot of modern Lovecraftian fiction leans towards treating everything as all gloom and doom with too heavy of a focus on Nihilism
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Jun 18, 2022 21:29
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DrSunshine posted:"With the kinds of things I've seen, this is the only job I can do now. deltagreen.txt Gearing up to play in my first DG...excited to suffer and die!
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Jun 18, 2022 21:34
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drrockso20 posted:Not to mention Lovecraft had more than a few times where the reaction of his characters to supernatural poo poo was less "collapse into a puddle of tears and slipping sanity" and more "use a gun, and if that don't work use more gun", and honestly at this point it feels more interesting to approach Lovecraftian Horrors as things that can be killed and thwarted(if at great personal risk obviously) than the more common approach a lot of modern Lovecraftian fiction leans towards treating everything as all gloom and doom with too heavy of a focus on Nihilism I like in The Dunwich Horror where one of the investigators, knowing that guns can't harm the creature, still brought a big game rifle because if the magic fails he's still going to try, dammit.
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Jun 19, 2022 04:26
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drrockso20 posted:Not to mention Lovecraft had more than a few times where the reaction of his characters to supernatural poo poo was less "collapse into a puddle of tears and slipping sanity" and more "use a gun, and if that don't work use more gun", and honestly at this point it feels more interesting to approach Lovecraftian Horrors as things that can be killed and thwarted(if at great personal risk obviously) than the more common approach a lot of modern Lovecraftian fiction leans towards treating everything as all gloom and doom with too heavy of a focus on Nihilism
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Jun 19, 2022 06:27
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DrSunshine posted:With the kinds of things I've seen, this is the only job I can do now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfdTEc8V48o
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Jun 19, 2022 17:11
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Hey everyone! Looking to change things up a bit with my rpg group and was thinking of trying out Call of Cthulhu. I’ve heard nothing but good things about it and I figure it would be a nice change of pace. What are some pre-written modules that people would recommend for a group that has no experience with Call of Cthulhu aside from some cultural osmosis? Would people recommend playing with pre-made characters, or should I let my players make their own characters to start? Any information would be appreciated!
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Jun 23, 2022 15:12
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Grab the Starter Set. It's got several adventures and all the rules you need to give the game a very thorough spin, and it's also very affordable for an RPG.
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Jun 23, 2022 15:19
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Yeah, grab the Starter Set. There is a new 40th anniversary version coming out in three days. Chargen in CoC is pretty laborious, so definitely offer pregens. The SS should have some and it's easy to find more. For more good one-shot adventures, grab the Keeper Screen, Dead Light and Other Dark Turns, and Mansions of Madness vol 1.
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Jun 23, 2022 15:31
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The starter rulebook includes the quick-and-dirty method for generating new characters for when you run out, too.
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Jun 23, 2022 15:36
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My recommendation for testing the waters of Call of Cthulhu would be the Starter Set (for Edge of Darkness) and the Keeper's Screen (for Blackwater Creek). You should be able to run both those scenarios with the starter rules and Blackwater Creek has enough going on in it for 3-5 sessions of gameplay.
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Jun 23, 2022 15:40
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Doorways to Darkness are short (~1 hour) adventures that are set up for new Keepers. Gateways to terror is another similar such product, and both have a lot of notes for the Keeper on how to run the modules. What everyone else said should be followed first though, these are just adventure modules.
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Jun 23, 2022 16:25
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